Forums

[Anonymous]

I recently recieved this in an email.
Does the statement, "We've always done it like that" ring any bells?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the

pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools

that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would

break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because

that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England)

for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's***came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman army
chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now, the twist to the story

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.

The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains.

The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.

The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track,
as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ***.

[TomDiehl]

We already debunked this urban legend of standard gauge on the other thread.

[Trainmaster.Curt]

Don't forget about the Narrow gauge either. When there was a railway in Newfoundland, it was all narrow gauge (3 ft 6")or(42") And also the White Pass & Yukon Route Railway, which is still running as a passenger/excursion railway.

[route_rock]

  You also had 2 footers ( some still run in Me.) 3 footers like the White Pass,Tweetsie<The circle in Co. plus numerous other locations ( hell we had one in Moline Illinois) Plus you also had broad gauge. The Erie wasnt it that was 5 foot?some 6 foot and I believe we even had an 8 foot gauge! Ahh history

[Don Gibson]

INTERESTING reading, but an old (trainman's) Wives tale.

[rtraincollector]

if you goto this site you can find most the faulse emails out befor you keep sending the trash around

 

http://www.truthorfiction.com/index-humor.htm

[NS2591]

I thought it was great, I got a laught out of it. Even though its not true, its still funny

[Jack_S]

Without knowing anything about rail history one can spot this as bogus because the Romans did not use war chariots.  By the time of Alexander the Great (4th Century BCE) chariots had become ineffectual on the battlefield.

In fact, by the time Julius Caesar invaded Britain (unsuccessfully) in the 1st century BCE, war chariots had been out of use for so long that the British war chariots took the Legions by surprise.  At first the British had some success with them because the Romans had no tactics to deal with them.  But, very quickly, the Romans figured out how to counter the chariots and went back to beating the Brits like a drum.

The Romans used chariots only for sport (chariot racing in the Circus Maximus) and religio-ceremonial occasions.  A general celebrating a Triumph rode in a chariot in the midst of his Triumphal parade.  The October Horse race (which ended the campaigning season) was a chariot race around the city, after which the lead horse of the winning team was sacrificed.

The Romans did not use chariots for war or for transportation.  Their cavalry rode horses and they used carts and wagons for transport on the roads.  Roman roads were sized to accommadate a squad of soldiers (8 men) marching abreast while carrying their gear.

Jack

[wjstix]

I wonder then, where did the 4'-8 1/2" standard gauge come from?? You'd think a round number like 5' (or Brunel's 8') would make more sense. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some horsy connection, given railcars were pulled by horses for centuries before locomotives. Maybe that is around the right width to allow a horse to walk between the rails pulling a car??

[TomDiehl]

I wonder then, where did the 4'-8 1/2" standard gauge come from?? You'd think a round number like 5' (or Brunel's 8') would make more sense. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some horsy connection, given railcars were pulled by horses for centuries before locomotives. Maybe that is around the right width to allow a horse to walk between the rails pulling a car??

Standard gauge was established with the bill to build the first transcontinental railroad. It was supposedly an average of the gauges in use in the US at the time.

[stmtrolleyguy]

I think there is some truth to this legend, although I think the truth in it is by chance.
(There is some connection, but it's got nothing to do with the reasons given.)

Chariots, wagons, anything with standard size wheel width leavs ruts.  We can see ruts from the Oregon Trail that are only 150 years old.  A standard width is very important (maybe not the Roman war chariots, but they must have standardized a wheel width for uniform road construction and wear.)  Any heavily used unpaved road with wagon traffic of any sort will leave ruts.

The horses connection to this story is also very important.  Before steam, railcars were indeed horse drawn.  They needed ample space for the horse to walk between the rails.  Also, imagine two rails running down a city street.  As wagons are driven over the rails, if a wagon wheel got caught inside the two rails, the wheel could snap as the wagon driver tried to turn and come over the rail.  Imagine if a wagon got trapped between the two rails if the width was wider that the wagon wheels.  Furthermore, railed vehicles still shared the same city streets as the regular wagons.  Making them narrorwer often simply cut capacity, but making them wider made them a menace to traffic (just like a wide load down a modern road today.)  Narrower railcars could be seen, but considerably wider ones frequently were not.

When the railroads came along, it's not surprising that most were around four and a half feet.  In my opinion, that was a good size.  Technology allowed locomotives and trains for that size tracks, and cars weren't to large to load/unload, or too small to move a profitable amount of goods.  When space wasn't availible, or there wasn't enough capitol, narrower guage lines were built.

 Figure a 3 foot guage is 45% smaller than the width of a standard guage line.  Going the other way, a 45% increase of standard guage would be almost a seven foot guage railroad, which didn't make sense.  They were probably too large, required too many bridges, and image the size of a steam locomotive for a seven foot guage line........

And, a radom though, about the 4 foot 8.5 inch width.....56 inches is a nice solid number, especially when you're not used to the 56.5 we are today.  I mean, if it's a good size for two horses, and it's about the same size tracks that had been used on some of the lines before, so why not 56 inches?  Maybe the original idea was supposed to be 4 feet, 8 inches, based on the distance from the outside of one flange to the outside of the other, but someone instead measured the cars to be 4 feet 8 inches from the inside of one flange to the inside of the other, adding 1/4 inch in thickness for each flange, pushing the guage out another 1/2 inch.

 

[tomikawaTT]

For more than you ever wanted to know about railroad track gauges, try this link:

http://www.turksib.com/gauges/index-e.html

Apparently fictional horses butts come in a myriad of dimensions!

Chuck